A Strange Talent Who Belongs Forever in 1972, Not Since
The phrase is Chris Bertram’s. The talent is Bobby Fischer, d. 2008. What I remember of the original Fischer-Spassky match is how crushingly important it was to me that Fischer win. The idea that he could lose filled me with fear. I was a terrible chess player, but I loved the game, read the odd book and wanted America to avoid losing the Cold War as long as possible. I don’t remember a thing about the matches.
I was going to post an old poem of mine in honor of the occasion, but just discovered that, while the file exists, sometime by Summer 1998 I pasted the text of a completely different poem over it and saved the file. So, instead, an anecdote.
In 1992 when Fischer and Spassky had their rematch in Yugoslavia I got caught up in the hype. The consensus is that it wasn’t brilliant chess – imagine Muhammad Ali and George Foreman boxing in 1992 – but chess enthusiasts hoped it might be until proven otherwise. All the rest of you cared about was Fischer’s stunts for the cameras, the spitting on official letters and stuff. A few of us came nightly to chess centers around the country to follow the progress of the matches themselves. In DC that happened at the US Chess Center, in a basement meeting room with a few rows of chairs. A Center staffer would work through the moves on a projection system of some kind, commenting on the positions and lines of continuation, ruefully allowing that nothing revolutionary was happening on the board. I was at that time in the middle of one of my occasional bouts of chess enthusiasm, so I attended most every night. In the row in front of me was always Charles Krauthammer.
Comment by Monte Davis —
January 19, 2008 @ 10:01 am
I go with CT commenter Bob McManus’s
As powerful as the “savant” meme is, I don’t believe in the law of conservation of mental gifts.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
January 19, 2008 @ 10:52 am
s/Fisher/Fischer
Comment by Karen —
January 19, 2008 @ 11:03 am
I don’t know about that Monte. Isn’t there some good evidence that gifted people are more likely to have bipolar disorder or at least that the disease runs in the families of gifted people? Maybe it’s that some people have the ability to overcome the symptoms and produce useful and beautiful things. Other people, either sicker to begin with or just without the compensating gifts can’t do that.
On Fischer himself, he was brilliant in one area and used that as much as he could. The other stuff doesn’t really matter. Had he been famous for, say, shooting people in mall, we’d be having a much different conversation.
Comment by Monte Davis —
January 19, 2008 @ 11:47 am
Karen: The gifted/bipolar link hasn’t held up very well — partly because the way very talented, energetic people behave when fully engaged in work they know is good can be very hard to distinguish from the diagnostic descriptions of mania or cyclothymic “high.”
Longitudinal studies of the gifted/talented are consistent in showing lower incidence of both mental and emotional disorders.
I think it’s just that when extreme talents and weirdness do coincide, the contrast is so vivid that it sticks in our minds…and falls in with our predisposition that God or nature or neurobiology keeps books and “balances things out.”
Comment by John Cole —
January 19, 2008 @ 11:50 am
Is ‘chess enthusiasm’ code for insomnia?
Comment by diana —
January 19, 2008 @ 12:29 pm
I wanted Fischer to win, too, but it had nothing to do with politics. I just loved the idea of the lone mad genius who taught himself the game up against a smoothly functioning Machine. And vanquishing it!!
It’s impossible to describe to people the popular delirium surrounding those matches.
I find it ironic that when Fischer was on the cover of Life Magazine, one of the other articles was about brain research.
I don’t think that Fischer should be compared to the “gifted/talented.” He’s part of a tiny subset of humanity that is so freakishly talented that we really don’t have the metrics to assess them properly. And that maybe is as it should be. If you wrote a book about him, it should be be called “A Confounding Mind.”
Comment by diana —
January 19, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
PS – His political opinions and Jewish self-hatred were repulsive. But he had a right to play chess wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and to renounce his US citizenship. He was a paranoid with enemies.
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 19, 2008 @ 1:32 pm
Nick: Oy. Fixed. I blame the Jews, BTW.
Monte: In the case of chess champions specifically, I dunno. Real chess prowess requires an almost total devotion of time to studying chess specifically, from a young age. It just doesn’t leave much room for attention to the other aspects of one’s life.
Comment by Jon H —
January 19, 2008 @ 3:59 pm
Would it be wrong to ask you to go back in time and tape a “kick me” sign on Chuck’s back?
Comment by John Emerson —
January 19, 2008 @ 4:02 pm
Fischer rouses my solidarity with the other socially inept and annoying people of the world. Geniuses or not.
I recently saw him paired with the socially inept and annoying genius Glenn Gould.
Gould, BTW, was not Jewish. Neither was Jay Gould of the financial disaster.
Diana, I haven’t forgotten you. The book will come!
Comment by Gary Farber —
January 19, 2008 @ 5:09 pm
“Is ‘chess enthusiasm’ code for insomnia?”
John, what would you think of someone posting that comment in one of your football threads, with the word “chess” switched out for “football”?
Hilarious?
Comment by diana —
January 19, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
Thanks John, I look forward to it.
The Wikipedia entry on Fischer points out that Fischer died age 64. There are 64 squares on a chess board.
I wonder if this wasn’t suicide?
Comment by John Cole —
January 19, 2008 @ 7:19 pm
I would laugh.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 19, 2008 @ 8:58 pm
Gary Kasparov argued that chess didn’t drive Fischer mad (if that’s what he was), but kept him lucid while he played. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a take from another Chess great.
Michael Shermer did a piece on genius, and he looked at Fischer, among others like Mozart. His argument was that Fischer wasn’t some genius whose brain was in a different category, but merely someone who used the native talent he had and practiced incessantly. That way, experience gave him the knowledge he needed to play all those simultaneous games.
Comment by Mona —
January 19, 2008 @ 9:07 pm
As well you should. Jeebus knows Jim posts fvcking endlessly on football (as Gary should well know). As you do as well. Love you both, and completely skip the posts either of you write on that topic.
About the topic of this thread, watching the news with my adult son last nite he was growling that reports of Bobby Fischer’s death were just so much more empty, blond-girl-missing-in-Aruba hype. It just isn’t possible to explain to him how captivated so many of us were back then for non-Oprah-level reasons